REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney during a break in Monday night's Republican presidential debate in Tampa.

Last night was the (omg) 18^th debate in the Repub nominating contest.

Nobody won and nobody lost. The best thing about it was the no applause rule, which forced members of the viewing audience to decide which answer was a big deal. As far as I could tell, none of them were. We didn’t even have the obligatory Newt-Gingrich-criticizes-the-moderator’s-question moment.

If anybody didn’t already know that, since leaving Congress, Newt Gingrich has become a multimillionaire by doing a great many things, many of which look, to the untrained eye, a whole lot like lobbying, but aren’t technically lobbying, then they found that at last night. But that information has been around for many months (including that over a million bucks of the not-technically-lobbying that Newt’s firm did was for the disgraced semi-public housing firm known as Freddie Mac), and Romney’s super PAC made this fact very, very famous during the run-up to the Iowa caucuses.

Somehow, that information and other similar arguments were devastating to Gingrich when his poll ratings plummeted and he dropped from first-in-the-polls to fourth place in Iowa and New Hampshire. But then the same information stopped being devastating, as Gingrich surged back to the top in South Carolina and now in the national Republican polls and in current Florida polling.

So Romney is apparently hoping that this angle is regaining its devastatingness (and yes, I know that’s not a word). He did have one new detail that might help. Turns out that although Gingrich was not technically lobbying for Freddie Mac, and he no longer says that he was paid all that money to provide historical perspective (he now says the work was “consulting,” not “history” but also not “lobbying”), but as Romney emphasized last night, the Freddie Mac official to whom Gingrich provided the consulting was Freddie Mac’s lobbyist. Got that straight?

Gingrich revealed that his firm employed an expert in the law of lobbying to make sure that nothing that was done would cross the line into lobbying. Two ways to look at that: Gingrich wanted to make doubly and expensively sure that his firm wouldn’t cross the line into lobbying; or Gingrich wanted to make sure that he was able to get as close to the line as possible while still being able to claim that he had done no lobbying.

The second best thing about the debate was the candidates speculating on whether Fidel Castro will “meet his maker,” as moderator Brian Williams question politely euphemized, or go to “the other place” as Gingrich predicted.

The candidates spent a lot of time on what a big deal it would be for U.S.-Cuba policy when Castro dies, without ever mentioning that Castro has been sick for years and is no longer in charge, so it’s just possible that his death will not be an epochal event, at least in practical terms. But the best part of the debate’s surprisingly long Cuba section (this was, after all, the first debate in Florida) was the underlying assumption that U.S.-Cuba policy has long been driven by the great desire to see Cuba become a free, independent democracy.

In fact, the United States probably could have promoted a real democracy in Cuba during the six decades before Castro took power, when the United States treated Cuba as a quasi-pseudo-not-really-independent nation. The United States established important elements of the Cuban Constitution by an act of the U.S. Congress. Seriously. Cuba was required to accept those terms as a condition of getting U.S. troops to leave Cuba. And Cuba was required to lease to the Americans the base at Guantanamo Bay, which it still occupies.

The Cuban dictator (Fulgencio Batista) whom Castro overthrew in 1957 held power without any serious democratic legitimacy, and that was fine with the United States.